The National Sunflower Association of Canada held its annual general meeting in Winnipeg last week during Crop Connect.

Executive director Darcelle Graham thinks acreage in Manitoba for 2016 will be about the same as last year around the 100,000 acre mark, but hopes to see some growth.

"I think there's some interest," she says, "we're definitely getting some calls from some new growers, looking to do something a little bit different. I think everybody's got to look at their crop production worksheets, see how it pencils out and go from there."

Agriculture Canada's first crop outlook for 2016 also expects sunflower acreage across the country to be relatively unchanged, but forecasts overall production to drop slightly due to possibly lower yields.

However, Graham says this year they're going to continue working on bringing more varieties to the table.

"So our primary project that we're doing is our variety development project, specific to confections. So we run a number of trials around the province to test the adaptability of these hybrids that are being developed with our breeder down in Fargo," she says. "We're pretty optimistic with what we're seeing coming out of our trials. We've got some varieties that are moving forward to the next level of testing, and a couple that are actually going to go to bigger scale trials in 2016."

She says a lot of their work on this project also consists of gauging what the end markets are interesting in purchasing.